Topic Course: Gender, Environment, and Sustainable Futures
one-way Exclusions
Course Description
DEVS 492 “Gender, Environment & Sustainable Futures” is a seminar course that examines feminist scholarship addressing social inequalities in environmental issues. Analyzing these issues critically reveals embedded power dynamics, which are crucial for understanding and avoiding worsening inequalities amid climate crises. Relying only on technical fixes and neglecting intersectional gender and social justice perspectives leads to inadequate, partial solutions.
The course highlights that environmental issues and solutions are gendered and linked to political, economic, patriarchal, and (neo)colonial interests, along with institutional agendas. A feminist perspective broadens understanding of society’s deep ties to the more-than-human world and the interlocking systems of domination that drive environmental and climate change and cause persistent inequalities and injustice.
Feminist environmental analysis and praxis aim to build just societies that reject ongoing exploitation of nature, which raises risks for marginalized peoples and ecosystems. The course highlights the extractive nature of the global economy, which appropriates natural resources and feminized reproductive care for economic growth and wealth concentration among select groups. Readings cover diverse topics, starting with an overview of feminisms in environment and development. They focus on ethnographic, reflective accounts of socio-ecological relations, activism, and advocacy, offering students real-world examples that connect scholarship, development policy and practice, and activism.
The course has two parts: (i) Foundations in feminist scholarship on environment and development; (ii) Specific key themes in feminisms related to environment and development.
Learning Outcomes
The student will be able to:
- Translate course ideas into communicable concepts via peer and interactive teaching, a key skill for communication. It may serve as initial practice for future teachers, academics, or training workshop facilitators.
- Understand feminist critiques of society-nature separation and how this is historically and institutionally naturalized, legitimated, and reproduced for human and economic ends.
- Develop creative multimedia formats to communicate reflections on environmental and climate crises through feminist scholarship.
- Develop the ability to formulate critical arguments and reason soundly while applying feminist concepts and ethics to environmental realities, guided by the course material.